


Drifting

by theacesofspades



Series: sarchengsey roadtrip snapshots [3]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Dissociation, Multi, Trans Character, Trans Female Character, cabeswater shit, time shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 14:54:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10121735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theacesofspades/pseuds/theacesofspades
Summary: Gansey wakes up with a gasp and immediately knows she’s slipping out of her proper time.





	

Gansey wakes up with a gasp and immediately knows she’s slipping out of her proper time.

She’s dizzy, and she can just make out dark shapes starting to form out of the corner of her eye. Gansey groans, but she doesn’t panic. She’s been through this before and she knows what to do.

She squeezes her eyes shut and tries to focus, to concentrate on where she is and what she’s touching, shrink the world around her to the motel they’re in to the room they’re in to the bed they’re in to them to her.

She breathes, in through her nose, out through her mouth, and concentrates.

They’re on the west coast. They’re in a small motel located next to a large forest that they picked because Henry was convinced it was haunted and Blue liked the aesthetic. Truth be told, Gansey was getting a little sick of motels. With Henry and her’s money, they could easily afford to stay in nice hotels the whole trip, but Blue had been insistent they do this the right way - whatever that meant. Though, if she were totally honest with herself, she did enjoy the quaint beauty of the small buildings. They reminded her of Monmouth, a bit.

Gansey shakes her head, pushing away memories and trying to bring herself back to the present. She pushes the heels of her palms into eyes to try to ground herself.

Focus.

They’re in a small room on the second floor. They’re in the same bed. She’s in between Blue and Henry.

Feel.

Henry’s hand on her thigh, his body pressed up against her back, his arms around her. His other hand up her shirt and resting on her belly, her hand on his. Blue’s head on her chest, their hands and legs entangled, their chests pushed together.

The blanket laid over them. Wrapped around them. Blue and Henry and the blanket wrapped around her around her around her around her

It’s too much, all of a sudden, and she sits up, kicking the blanket off her legs. She curls up, rests her head on her knees, and breathes. In and out. In. Out. Nose. Mouth.

It’s not helping. There’s still too much . . . _time_. Too much around her. The room is still off center and the dark masses in the corners aren’t going away.

She crawls down to the bottom of the bed and gets up slowly, quietly. She can deal with this on her own, like she has before, she doesn’t need or want to wake Henry and Blue. She pads slowly to the bathroom door, her arms out feeling ahead of and around her. She knows the shapes in her eyes aren’t there, but she doesn’t want to run into the wall instinctively avoiding them.

She makes it to the bathroom without incident and quickly shuts the door behind her before she turns on the lights.

Gansey pushes her hands in the edge of the sink and looks herself in the mirror. Her face is a little blurry, a combination of the sleep stuck in her eyes and the lack of glasses, so she closes her eyes and focuses again on what she can feel.

She feels cold. The room is too cold. Cold sink, cold floor, cold air. She can’t think, it’s too cold and there’s too much. Too much is happening.

_‘I want that book of yours. And you’d better give me your cell phone, too.’_

Gansey freezes.

_Don’t go there. That’s past. It’s over. It’s done._

She refuses to open her eyes and squeezes the sink counter. She needs to stay here, stay now. She pushes forward, away from the memory, away from the car, the road, the gun. Go foward, foward, foward.

Sometimes when it’s bad, this will happen. She knows what’s going on, knows what to expect, but it can still be scary and disconcerting, the past rushing at her.

_‘Shit, are you stupid?’_ Ronan’s voice smashes her concentration to pieces and her breathing gets shaky. She tries to place where she is, when she is, is she going the right way, when is this, where is she?

(She’s in the bathroom, she can feel the counter pressed into the palms of her hands, but she can’t concentrate, she has to concentrate.)

_‘I catch you staring at a wasp again -’_ No, no, no! She was going to wrong way, the wrong time. _‘- let it kill you. Screw that.’_

Gansey growled in frustration, pushing her hands into the sink, hoping the cold will force her back to here, to now, but it’s gone warm under her hands and she keeps slipping slipping slipping.

_Now, Gansey. You need to get here and now. Back to the motel, to Blue, to Henry._

Then she hears his voice and she almost giggles. _‘Are you claustrophobic?’_ Henry. Her darling Henry. She smiles grimly and answers that Henry from another time, “No, I have other vices.” She was going right, now. She was getting closer, much closer, to being back.

_Breathe, Gansey, you’ve got it._

Gansey breathes deeply and lets the words wash over her, lives her life again, sped-up and warped, rushing it, pulling it, back to this moment, forward to this moment - to her holding the sink in a bathroom in a motel on the west coast. Blue and Henry were right next door. She was here. She was now. She could do this.

She opens her eyes and sees a blurry mess she makes out as her reflection in the mirror. That’s a good sign. She’s not seeing two times at once, at least.

She slowly, methodically, forcibly moves from the sink to the small shower and turns it on, all the way on, as hot as it will go, then moves back to the sink and does the same with it. She waits in front of the mirror, arms wrapped around herself, waiting to warm up.

Eventually, the water gets hot enough to fog the mirror but now she really can’t see herself, so she closes her eyes again, and moves back to the sink, pushing her hands into the counter.

_Focus, Gansey. What can you hear? Right now. Right here._

She hears the shower and the sink. Water rushing. If she breathes deeply, she can slow it down, make it calmer, make it a creek, a small ripple of running water.

She breathes in. Breathes out.

_What can you feel? Here. Now._

the cold sink pressing into her palms

the waistband of her underwear digging into her hip

the chill of the floor tiles on the soles of her feet.

The warm blanket of humidity slowly wrapping itself around her.

_Smaller, now. Focus on you. This you, in this time, in this place._

Gansey starts with her feet, her feet on the cold floor. Up, up, up her ankles, her legs, her waist. She focuses on her torso, on her breathing, in and out and in and out. She moves to her shoulders, down her arms to her fingertips, all her digits here and accounted for and focused on.

She moves her attention up, back up her arms, through her neck to her head. There’s nothing on her face now. She usually focuses on the solidness of her glasses wrapped around her head, but she’s not wearing them now. Her hair is in her face, though - she’s been growing it out, as slow as that has been - so she focuses on that. It’s sitting softly on her cheeks, curling around her forehead and if she loses her focus she’ll be here all night tracking its growth through her whole life, so she goes slowly, patiently, feeling its presence on her head and on her face, but ignoring individual strands and focusing on the general feel.

Gansey breathes deeply again, a smooth inhale and exhale, and opens her eyes.

The room is still a blurry mess and she wishes she had had the foresight to grab her glasses off the bedside table, but she’s feeling better now, more solid and stable. She still has some small black spots in the corner of her vision, though, so she doesn’t want to risk moving back out into the main room just yet. She lets her thoughts wander a little as she settles back into her body in this time. She remembers Adam’s advice for moments like this, for when she’s in her time and she needs to calm down.

“I don’t know exactly what will help,” he had told her. “Obviously your connection with Cabeswater is very different from mine. But try . . . describing it, maybe? Spell it out, how it feels.” Make it solid. Make her feelings and experiences a physical thing she can observe and study and file away. She tries it now, touching at her feelings, at how it feels when time slips away from her.

She’s always thought it felt like time was moving parallel to itself. In her one moment there were millions of other moments simultaneously and, yet, chronologically dissonant.

Her mother had caught her once, spacing out and trying to return to some semblance of normalcy (or what amounted to normal for her). She had tried to help her come back to herself, had frowned through Gansey’s stumbling explanation - an explanation lacking in the most important facts - and had stated ‘dissociation’ and asked Gansey if she had wanted to talk. And she really didn’t want to. So that had been that.

Adam had scoffed - what’s it matter what you call it, you’ll get through it, you’ve done harder - and she supposed he would know best.

Sometimes she wishes she was as strong as Adam.

When she’s feeling particularly honest with herself, it’s more than sometimes.

She scoffs at herself for that - perhaps that was a little too honest a line of thinking to be following this early in the morning in a motel bathroom - but she doesn’t try to stop the thought. It is true, after all, and Gansey has found she gets better results with remaining calm and in her own time when she doesn’t try to direct her train of thought.

Her mind drifts around and settles almost uncomfortably on the topic of her trip’s imminent end.

She and Henry and Blue would be returning home soon and as eager as she was to see Ronan and Adam and Helen and her parents - and she was eager - she was unsure of what awaited her return. Her hand drifted unconsciously to her hair. It was a relief to know that, whatever happened, she had her friends with her, always. And Helen, she supposed. Helen seemed the type to welcome her sister with open arms, the kind of open arms that dared anyone to oppose her decision. Gansey grinned. Maybe she was looking forward to coming out to her sister after all.

She had, in fact, been dropping hints in their texts and phone calls, as subtly as she could (Blue delightedly informed her that she had all the subtlety of Ronan with a crush but Henry assured her, unconvincingly, that that was a good thing), and all of Helen’s response had been more than positive.

Gansey wasn’t sure, however, how her parents would take it. She wasn’t quite sure what would be worse, outright rejection, or an acceptance that came with the caveat of her mother using her family’s newfound diversity as a platform.

“Tch, Helen wouldn’t let her, I suppose.” Gansey rubs her eyes, marveling at how good the pressure feels.

She yawns and wishes she could remember her dream. She hopes it was something good, whatever it was about, although her waking up so abruptly didn’t bode well. It didn’t really matter now, though.

She blinks sleepily at the blur in front of her and realizes with a start the black spots are gone. She’s done it, then. She’s returned to herself, in her time, without any help. She grins and indulges herself with a pat on her own shoulder (a habit, she knows, that Blue does not need to know about).

She yawns, her arms stretched high above her head, turns the bathroom lights off, and returns to the bedroom. She pads delicately back to the large bed and crawls back in between Blue and Henry, slipping under the covers as unintrusively as she can. Blue stirs, but only to curl back up next to her and throw an arm over her side. Gansey’s right hand finds Henry’s in the dark and she slips her fingers through his, softly, so as not to wake him, and settles back into her place among them.

She grins to herself genuinely for the first time since she’d woken up. It was amazing how nice a blanket and the arms of her girlfriend and boyfriend felt. Gansey thinks she must be the luckiest girl in the whole damn world.

**Author's Note:**

> So I've edited this one a bit more than I usually do, but it's also been sitting in my drafts for fucking ever and I'm tired of looking at it, so here. I promise one day not all my fics will take place in bathrooms. One day. I appreciate feedback, as always!


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